Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today. The post:
"Dear friends of Odysee, Starting today, we’re removing all ads. We don’t need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive. Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn’t worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.
As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as ‘free-speech’) typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It’s been that way for centuries and is never going to change.
As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and ‘Free Speech’ platforms try to build their own ad businesses it’s apparent to us that we’re building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.
Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that’s fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don’t like ads.
Best, Founder & Creator, Chief Executive Officer. Julian Chandra"
I used to like Odysee until I saw them clearly promote conspiracy theories and far-right, almost Nazi rhetoric on the homepage.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Did you mean can be modified? Or what does this have to do with Nazi rhetoric? Maybe you have a different idea about the word “frontend”?
Sorry if my wording was unclear, let me rephrase.
Odysee is the platform, the site, the frontend, and the company. LBRY was the backend, the blockchain-based system that actually stored the videos themselves.
Odysee was the main interface to interact with the videos stored on LBRY, to essentially act like YouTube, but the videos were technically available to anyone.
Odysee then used the justification that the backend was decentralized to say that they had to remain entirely neutral to any content on Odysee, because a decentralized system inherently cannot have its content censored by one party.
This ignored the fact that they could choose to modify which videos their frontend would show to users. They acted as if this was not possible, even though it was.
Thus, a decent YouTube alternative with some good creators on it refused to censor any nazi content that started making its way there because YouTube rightfully deplatformed its supporters, and let it infect the platform without doing anything to stop it, pretending as if they had no choice, while in reality, it just brought them more revenue.
Oh right, so you were talking about the content, that’s not what I understood under “frontend”. Thanks for clearing it up.
I don’t have any experience with the platform, so I’m not in a position to judge their decisions, but it’s always tricky when you present yourself as censor free. There’s things you obviously don’t want on your service, but if it falls within the legal realm, it is no longer a matter of “will we block Nazi material” but whether from that point onward you start taking a moral and political stance.
Things get incredibly tricky and cumbersome if you choose that route, not just from an administrative perspective but also technically. I can understand why the people who operate the platform would prefer to primarily use legality as a deciding factor, as not every ideological issue that you open yourself up to if you take the other route is as straightforward as fascism.
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This is exactly what they should have done, and one of the main reasons I got annoyed with them. There was one single public RPC endpoint for the LBRY blockchain that was publicly available. one. (and then it went down shortly after I found it)
Compared to other blockchain-based systems, with tons of free public RPCs (click on the arrow below Ethereum Mainnet), LBRY was absolutely terrible.
It meant there was almost no tooling or resources for any developers to start their own site, and essentially killed the very idea of doing so.
Compare that to something like Lemmy or Mastodon, where I’ve personally seen numerous different moderation policies on different instances, and Odysee just stopped feeling like a good alternative to YouTube.
It’s a shame because the thing that kills alternative platforms is getting flooded with racists to the point that they drive everyone else out.
A lot of “free speech” platforms box themselves into a corner by declaring themselves “free speech” platforms while intending that to mean they won’t ban users for mild wrongthink, but then white supremacists show up, and if they get banned then they start causing a massive shitstorm over the fact that the platform isn’t truly supporting free speech. Then they drive out all the normal people who don’t want to be associated with them and the platform is forced to shutdown.
Then you have morons like Tim Pool who will endlessly attack “free speech” platforms if they ban white supremacists.
As if Youtube didn’t promote conspiracy theories and almost Nazi rhetorics that serve the country it’s based in. They do, which they don’t call as such. Everything else they’ll call conspiracy theories and propaganda.
The difference between Odysee and YouTube is that YouTube doesn’t claim to be a free speech platform that allows any possible statements on, and does often take down a lot of the harmful content. You only see the remainder, not the whole.
Odysee is quite small, and as such, could relatively easily moderate much more of the content on its platform, if they actually cared about doing so.
Odysee explicitly tries to allow as much speech as possible, claiming that they totally won’t allow any bad content, while in reality, platforming LGBTQ+ misinformation, white nationalist rhetoric, anti-immigrant propaganda, etc.
All of those violate their Community Guidelines, by the way. But remember, it’s guidelines, not actual policy as to what they remove.
I have no idea why you’re being downvoted since you’re 100% correct. I watch one video about gaming and YouTube’s recommendations are all alt-right anti-feminist stuff with Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
Google surely knows enough about me to know I lean far-left but the algorithm is determined to feed me that slop.
I have no idea from a technical perspective if Odysee’s algorithm is independent from or worse than YouTube’s, but the criticism of YouTube is completely valid.
I didn’t read the argument as saying one platform’s behavior excuses the other. I saw it as saying that both are bad.
It certainly doesn’t come across as a defense of either platform to say they’re both infested by Nazis.
I have watched super progressive content on Youtube but also watched conservative content as well. It’s possible there are a lot of progressives who also watch content from the other side so the algorithm pushes it.
that’s why you should be logged out of Google and also delete your cookies periodically :) To reset the memory of Google
The thing is that I do want to have my subscriptions and favorite channels, and as long as UBO blocks ads, I haven’t fully made the switch to a different front-end.
But it still bothers me that it serves me far-right, religious, and conspiracy theory content given that I’ve never once engaged with any of those topics.
So that makes odysee’s behaviour OK?
Nothing. But mentioning it, don’t forget to mention Youtube as well.
Fox news seems to own YT’s algorithm as far as I can tell.
Never a click from me, but 6 of the top 10 news vids every time.
i almost never watch news on yt, haven’t gotten any.
Unfortunately that’s one of the problems with a lot of alternative platforms.
You would think there’d be some decentralized video hosting thing popular with us Fediverse types but in practice they’re all the low spots in the gutter in which the densest shit gathers. Most of the audience is on Youtube, and you only migrate to an alternative site if you’ve been banned from Youtube, and the folks who haven’t been banned from Youtube don’t tend to want to go stand next to the people who have so it’s difficult for legitimate content creators to adopt those alternative platforms.
Dailymotion still exists and I think you can still upload there but I know of no “dailymotioners.” Vimeo seems to have gone in a b2b direction, Twitch is mainly for live streaming, Tiktok succeeded where Vine failed, Nebula was some Youtubers starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, Floatplane was LMG starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, then you’ve got the several porn sites of varying dubiousness, and then down in the sump you’ve got the likes of LBRY and Odysee.
There are a few creators out there that publish multiple places. If it doesn’t cost to publish, we could start encouraging more people to publish more places. The biggest problem is you do actually have a chance to get paid on Youtube. Most of the content worth watching is only doing it because they can make money
See that is what I think would eventually allow another platform to take off, is publishing to two sites at once.
Google’s Adsense…I guess there are people making useful amounts of money with it? A lot of Youtubers seem to prefer having their own sponsors and do the ad read themselves and/or have some service like Patreon to allow their audience to fund them directly. Especially since that revenue won’t just disappear on the whims of an algorithm like Adsense money will. “We’ve demonetized and age restricted this video. Reason? coin came up tails.”
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
They never, ever stated the content on Odysee can’t be removed; this is a misunderstanding spread by both people who don’t use the platform, and even a lot who do use the platform but haven’t properly done their research about how the platform works. They can’t not have content removed since they are still legally required to remove illegal content, such as that which breaks copyright law, for example, pirates uploading full-length movies. Than when people find out that content can in fact be removed, they call Odysee a lair for something they never claimed.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
Fair complaint.
